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How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

nytimes.com

61–70 of 285 posts

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#61

Does anyone have a datasheet so we can calculate the Energy ROI?

Here you go: https://www.vestas.com/~/media/vestas/about/sustainability/p...

Money-shot on p66. About 8 months for EROEI (Energy returned on energy invested). I worked on some of these Life Cycle Analyses and can attest that they were quite rigorous.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#62
post #24

Problem is that these are political markets not market markets. Denmark spent a lot of money on getting their windmill industry up and running and windmills still aren't solving the base problem as they aren't reliable for all sorts of weather. Furthermore, windmilss don't really scale well, Nuclear on the other hand which is both safer and more scalable and greener would change that but right now only the Chinese se…

You know Europe is developing a fusion reactor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Station

Countries have been "developing" fusion power for decades. It'll arrive shortly after quantum powered personal computers.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#63

The future of energy is mostly wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear with grid scale energy storage and long distance HVDC transmission lines. IMHO :)

I’ve always been told that transmission of electricity is hard or inefficient. What is HVDC and why is it better?

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#64

The future of energy is mostly wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear with grid scale energy storage and long distance HVDC transmission lines. IMHO :)

I’ve always been told that transmission of electricity is hard or inefficient. What is HVDC and why is it better?

Nat Geo article that explains it.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2012/12/1212...

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#65
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about building up capacity alone: you want to take power off the grid at negative energy price times.

You are taking power off the grid: The power otherwise produced by the hydro plant. Of course with a lower reservoir, you can go into negative territory instead of "just" taking the plant down to 0.

Nope. Adding power to the grid is +X MW. Removing power to the grid is -X MW. Not producing any power is 0 MW.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#66
I like this article. I like that is has nice big pictures and videos, but they dont do that stupid big 'screenspace' image thing that seems to be popular in these sorts of articles now.

Also their control centre looks horrible. Wheres all the crap on their desks? I hope they only just had to tidy it away for the sake of a press photo.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#67
post #15

The interesting question is what effect clean energy has to the usage of hydrocarbons. Will it bring reduce global demand or just reduce the price of energy. The good news is: CO2 emission intensity is going down globally and emissions per capita in US, China and EU28 are going down. The bad news are: Emissions per capita are still going up globally, and hydrocarbon usage and CO2 emissions are breaking records year a…

Are there known fundamental obstructions to developing a leap frog effect in energy tech?

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#68

The future of energy is mostly wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear with grid scale energy storage and long distance HVDC transmission lines. IMHO :)

I’ve always been told that transmission of electricity is hard or inefficient. What is HVDC and why is it better?

High voltage DC. High voltage means it’s more efficient (power dissipation depends on current, not voltage, so for the same power, higher voltage means much less dissipation). DC (direct current instead of alternating) makes it easier to connect disparate grids as you don’t have to worry about phasing.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why the only way to deal with climate change is countries with carbon reserves deciding to leave it in the ground. If they don't, there is so much demand for the stuff (burning it is so incredibly useful) that it'll all be burned.

Or for those with wealth to buy those reserves and put mechanisms in place to inhibit the extraction of those petroleum resources.

Unfort, those in the position of power throughout the modern history has done the exact opposite.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#70
post #15

The interesting question is what effect clean energy has to the usage of hydrocarbons. Will it bring reduce global demand or just reduce the price of energy. The good news is: CO2 emission intensity is going down globally and emissions per capita in US, China and EU28 are going down. The bad news are: Emissions per capita are still going up globally, and hydrocarbon usage and CO2 emissions are breaking records year a…

If clean energy manages to get cheap enough eventually it will be easier to synthesize simple hydrocarbons out of atmospheric and water than to drill them out of the group and we can end up carbon neutral as a whole. We'll see how cheap midday solar ends up when the price finishes dropping.

The cost of solar stabilizes when the cost is determined by the cost of land, energy storage, electric grid and transfer cost and installation and maintenance.

If you get the conversion efficiency to the same level as photosynthesis (30% nominally) the cost of energy could approach the cost of producing biofuels.

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